AT least 10.3 million Nigerians have been issued National Identification Numbers in the first five months of 2022, data obtained from the National Identity Management Commission’s portal have shown.
This brings the total number of Nigerians with NINs to 82.73 million as of May 26, 2022. The data on the NIMC’s portal showed that as of January 1, 2022, there were 72.7 million Nigerians with NINs.
It added that the number of unique NIN grew to 75.36 million as of February 21; 77.1 million unique NINs were recorded as of March 21; and 80.7 million as of April 23.
The data reveals that NIMC issues an average of two million NINs per month which is consistent with what the Director-General of the NIMC, Aliyu Aziz, recently disclosed in an interview on the Frontiers Show on the Nigerian Television Authority monitored by dejoymedia.
According to him, the commission has the capacity to issue about three million NINs monthly. He added that the present capacity of the agency could accommodate only 100 million Nigerians.
He had said, “We built it (the database) to cater for a 100 million. Right now, we are at eighty million. Also, we have the government’s approval to upgrade it. So, before we reach there, we must have upgraded to about 250 million.
“So, we don’t have issues with that. Most of the time, our major challenges are either power or the bandwidth of the connectivity that we have but not the infrastructure.”
With the total number of issued NINs hitting 82.73 million, about 14.77 million telecommunication subscribers still do not have NINs.
According to GSMA, the global body of telecom operators worldwide, there were 97.5 million unique mobile subscribers in Nigeria as of September 2018.
Based on a recent Federal Government directive, the subscribers have not been able to make outgoing calls on their lines as a result of the implementation of the government’s SIM-NIN policy.
